[css3-lists] maintainance of counter styles WAS: Khmer consonants as list markers

On Thu, 12 Jul 2012 18:35:41 +0200, Tony Graham <tgraham@mentea.net> wrote:

> On Thu, July 5, 2012 12:21 am, fantasai wrote:
>> On 07/04/2012 02:01 PM, Tony Graham wrote:
> ...
>>> My understanding is that an Khmer consonantal list style would be used
>>> by
>>> Khmer speakers if it were available to them [5].
>>>
>>> Can/should it be added to a future draft of css3-lists?
>>
>> Seems reasonable to me. Can you put together an @counter-style rule for
>> Tab
>> to copy? (You'll also want to check with Khmer speakers as to what the
>> correct
>> behavior is once you get to the end of the alphabet.)
>
> Based on feedback from Sovann Heng (&#6048;&#6081;&#6020;
> &#6047;&#6075;&#6044;&#6030;&#6098;&#6030;) and Danh Hong, the proposed
> @counter-style rule is:
>
> [...snip...]

I think this is a good example of why the CSS WG shouldn't take the  
responsibility for specifying counter types for that many languages, at  
least not in a normative document. There are not enough experts of all  
languages in the working group to do a good job for all languages. In this  
case, we were lucky enough to be told what we were missing, but I don't  
think this is approach is reliable enough to scale.

And if we're not sure our definitions are good or appropriate, making them  
normative and asking vendors to implement them sounds questionable to me.

Maybe a better approach would be to start a community group tasked with  
developing and maintaining counter styles with a focus on i18n, and  
providing the result of their work as a stylesheet (or set of style  
sheets) that authors can use, rather than as a standard that vendors must  
support.

This group could release updates more often than the WG could in a rec  
track document, make progress faster and achieve better coverage by  
focusing on the topic and thus potentially attract relevant experts who  
wouldn't consider joining the too generic CSS WG, provide multiple version  
simultaneously...

  - Florian

Received on Friday, 13 July 2012 06:56:27 UTC